Interview with Roland Simon

This interview took place in Poznan, Poland on August 18, 2005 and was made in French with the help by English interpretors.

RR: Roland, you are involved in the group Théorie Communiste in France which has existed since the early 1970s. Could you tell us in short what were the main reasons for creating the group at that time, and how it has, in general, developed over the years?

RS: This question is best answered in the text ‘Théorie Communiste: Background and Perspective’ that has been published in Aufheben 11. There is no point in repeating what was said in that text except to specify the moment the problematic of TC became centred on the question of the restructuring, that is to say: a period of capital which comes to a close, a cycle of struggles which terminates, and another relation between the classes which is put in place. That appeared in 1979 in no. 3 of TC where we immediately confronted the difficulty of trying to define the restructuring; we went through several approaches, several different sorts of definition.

The first approach was too centred on the process of labour exclusively. This was at the end of the 70s when computerisation and automation were being introduced into the labour process. We thus focussed a lot on this transformation, and we defined the restructuring as an appropriation of the social power of labour1 in fixed capital, i.e. the division of labour, cooperation. We went on to speak of the restructuring, in a rather formalistic manner, as the process of valorisation which traverses the entirety of its own conditions. We were thus getting at something which increasingly enveloped the entirety of the process of reproduction. In particular we insisted on the transformation of modalities of the reproduction of labour power and the relation between the process of production and the market. The difficulty that we faced there was that we saw the danger of dissolving the specificity of productive labour and of confounding everything. We were on the verge of heresy…

Now we finally arrived
at the definition of the restructuring as the abolition of everything which
could present an obstacle to the self-presupposition of capital, to its fluidity.
With this approach we conserved a specificity to the process of reproduction
of productive labour whilst at the same time conserving a vision of the transformation
of the entire process of reproduction. I’m not going to do an exposition of
the restructuring now, but that implies, for example, the dissolution, by way
of flexiblisation, of the opposition between work and being unemployment; in
relation to the market there is the theory of flux; there is the disappearance
of the separation of accumulation into national areas, the end of the
distinction between the centre and the periphery, the disappearance of the
Eastern block.

So the principle
consequence of this restructuring is the overcoming of the contradiction
which had characterised the entire previous cycle. That is to say the contradiction
between on the one hand a labour power which is created, reproduced and put to
work by capital in a more and more socialised and collectivised manner. And
at the same time the form of appropriation by capital of this
social/collective labour power which at a certain point appears as limited.
For example, it appears as an obstacle at the level of the labour process in
the problems which arise from the production line, and at the level of reproduction
in the crisis of welfare. Thus Capital has created a social labour power which
has become an obstacle to valorisation. That is to say that because the forms
of this social power become rigid (this could be the forms of resistance on the
line, the problems of welfare) the socialised reproduction of labour
power by capital at a certain point becomes an obstacle to its valorisation.
In the previous cycle of struggle, this antagonistic situation manifested itself
as a workers’ identity which was the foundation of all the determinations of
the previous cycle. A workers’ identity which was moreover confirmed by
the reproduction of capital in the hiatus that existed between this social
force created by capital and the forms through which it appropriated it. It was
this situation that the restructuring abolished.

RR: Are there any other theoretical traditions – apart from the Dutch–German left – that you have found inspiration from, like operaismo/autonomist Marxism or perhaps Regulation School? And what use could be found (or not found) in Bordiga and the Italian left?

RS: The principle affiliation of TC is the Dutch–German left. To refer back to the first question the people who founded TC came out of a council communist tradition. We explained in TC no. 14 our relation to the ultra-left and I can give the definition of the ultra-left that we formulated:

We can call the
ultra-left all practise, organisation and theory which poses the revolution
as the affirmation of the proletariat. Whilst considering this affirmation
as a critique and negation of everything which define the proletariat in its
implication with capital and the state, which are only seen as integrating
mediations. In this sense the ultra-left is a contradiction in process. Why? Because
the revolution must confront the very strength of the class as a class of the
capitalist mode of production. By way of an illustration: this is the
tragedy of the German revolution. Because on the one hand this affirmation
finds in its strength its own justification and its raison d’être. On the other
hand, it is the same being in capital which, being for capital, must demand
its autonomy, become a being for itself. This is the extreme point where we
can almost find the possibility of formulating the revolution as a
self-negation of the proletariat. But on its own basis it cannot go further.
It’s like Moses before the promised land.

As far as the Italian left goes, this point of being able to almost see the revolution as the disappearance of classes is something that is very important in the German–Dutch left but which hardly exists in the Italian left – only in the very marginal texts which remain more or less clandestine. Their approach is incapable of arriving at that point.

Operaismo. We have sometimes taken over certain formulations used by operaismo like, for example, the central figure of the worker and class composition. But we use them as evocative images and not as strict theoretical categories. Before TC, at the beginning of the 70s, we had a journal which was called Communist Intervention and one of the first things we wrote was a critique of the concept of the political wage. Which is to say that I think that Operaismo has never actually gone beyond its own roots in the Italian left [mainstream left e.g. communist party, CGT, Roland’s note]. In a polemic way we could define operaismo as a radical syndicalism which is hoping for a political miracle. I think that what the ‘de-objectification’ they attempted was nothing but a change of the point of view. It’s not because we change the side which we view of something that the thing changes. In relation to the reciprocal implication of the proletariat and capital, they never saw that implication as a totality. For them it always remained an interaction.

In relation to the Regulation School. Here too we take
certain expressions and even certain analyses, for example, Fordism, the
crisis of Fordism. But even if we take up the expression ‘Fordism’, we are
opposed to the idea of the distribution/sharing of productivity gains. It’s
not a sharing of productivity gains but a transformation in the value of
labour power, the value of labour too is defined historically and the transformations
of capital in turn transforms this historical character of value. In regulationism
there is a methodological trap: a principle of the comprehension of reality
which is constructed ex-poste is transformed into a principle ex-ante.
Regulationism doesn’t limit itself to a principle of interpretation of the
economic processes; but this coherence, which is a principle of comprehension,
is imparted to the capitalist mode of production as an intrinsic reality. This
critique of the Regulation School wouldn’t be very interesting if it remained merely a
critique, but we see in contemporary theoretical expressions the reproduction
of this trap. Instead of seeing the restructuring as really existing
capitalism, and seeing this as what constitutes it as a system, the error is
to search in the definition of the restructuring for the best coherence
possible (between the economic processes). To be blunt I think this is the
error of Dauvé when he takes up the question of the restructuring.

The other important influence for us was the Situationist International. They were among the first to be able to speak of revolution as the abolition of all classes. But they did so in a whole series of contradictions. Firstly in speaking at the same time of workers councils, and also in searching for a way out through the discourse of the suppression and realisation of art. I think the SI led programmatism to its point of explosion. For example in the double definition the situationists gave of the proletariat: they saw themselves as very ‘old workers’ movement’ and were even proud to claim this heritage, but at the same time they gave an alternative aspect of the definition of the proletariat as all those who have no control over their life and who know it. And with the theory of the proletariat and its representation, that allows them to place, in the category of representation, everything which could be the existence of the class within capital, and in this way creating a sort of internal contradiction within the proletariat explaining it can overcome itself as a class. It’s the furthest possible point which could be arrived at within the programmatism of the IS. This point of explosion is demonstrated in the impossibility for Debord to tie together his theory of the spectacle. He is always trying to say that the spectacle is not a mask, it’s not an illusion, it is reality. But at that point, from where can the overcoming (the revolution) arrive? In my opinion it is this problem with which Debord is struggling throughout The Society of the Spectacle. Because within the theory of the spectacle in the SI, there is a theory which we can call vulgar, the theory of the illusion. It is the approach represented by Vaneigem, Theo Frey and Jean Garneau, and its not the theory of the spectacle which we find in Debord’s book. It’s his whole problem: Debord doesn’t want to make the spectacle into a mask or an illusion. But in fact the theory with which the SI practically functioned was the vulgar theory.

And in relation to the Italian Left… As I said, we didn’t take all that much. It’s critique of the German left, of course; the critique of revolution as self-management, and its
insistence on the content of the revolution as the abolition of value, and of
wage-labour. But it’s a critique which remains Leninist in the sense that one
will continue to speak of state planning, and of a period of transition.
Another important thing is the critique of democracy. But it is a critique
which remains formal and even abstract, that is to say it critiques the citizen
merely as a form, founded on the existence of value and the commodity – it
doesn’t go to the point of fetishism of capital itself. Because in the
fetishism of capital, this individual of exchange, of value, of the commodity,
which is the democratic individual, this fetishism is taken up in the
fetishism of the elements of the process of production, for this is the
fetishism of capital itself, which explains how we can rediscover within
democracy, within the functioning of democracy, under these fetishised
forms, the class.

The other point of the Italian left would be the critique of anti-fascism, but we also find that in the German left, and almost in the same way.

After that, the theorists that for us are important:

Lukács… in the theory of reification which we use sometimes to define the self-presupposition of capital, there is a relation between the two concepts.

Korsch… above all when he loses track and makes blunders, it is there where he is most interesting – for example in the Theses on Marxism. Because there, like some other theorists he sees the limits, the impasse of programmatism, but at that point he is on the verging of abandoning any theory of class.

And there is Mattick… in his economic texts. Otherwise, in his political texts, he remains at the most classic level of the ultra-left. But his economic texts are essential, above all his critique of Rosa Luxemburg’s Accumulation of Capital: where he argues that the crisis is the tendency of the profit to fall – it is not a question of markets; it’s not a question of realisation.

And finally, with a lot of precautions… Althusser in his critique of Hegelian Marxism, and his critique of humanism. I think that there Althusser, Balibar and sometimes Rancière, are essential. It’s not for all that that we are going to take up his theory of the epistemological break, or treat Marxism as a science. But there is a lot to be learnt in the critique of humanism.

RR: How do you see the relation between on the one hand ‘revolutionaries’ / theoretical groups, such as your own, and on the other hand the working class and its struggles?

RS: We think class struggle is
necessarily theoretical. Every struggle produces theory. Of course we have to
distinguish between theory in the grand sense which I employ there and theory
in the restricted sense which is the product of a few people in a group
somewhere. In the grand sense the point is that the proletariat is always conscious
of what it does, and if I call this consciousness theoretical it is because
it can not be a self-consciousness. And this consciousness always passes by a
knowledge of capital, by the mediation of capital. It is because it passes
through another that I can not call it a self-consciousness, why I call it
theoretical consciousness. This theoretical consciousness which exists in the
global movement of the opposition to capital ends up in the reproduction of
capital. And it’s at that moment that theory in a restricted sense is
articulated. This restricted theory becomes the critique of the fact that the
consciousness of the opposition ends up in the reproduction, in the
self-presupposition of capital. In this sense theoretical production, in all
its diversities and divergences, is as much a part of the class struggle as
any other activity which constitutes the class struggle. At that point, the
question ‘What is to be Done?’ is completely emptied of meaning; we no
longer search to intervene in struggles as theoreticians or as militants with
a constituted theory. That signifies that when we are personally implicated in
a conflict, we operate at the same level as everyone else; and although we
don’t forget what we do elsewhere, the way in which we do not forget this is in
recognising that the struggle in which we find ourselves is itself
reworking, reformulating and producing theory. I think that it’s in this way
that we can be in a struggle without forgetting what we do elsewhere: capable
of seeing the struggle itself as what produces theory. That is to say, theory
can never be pre-existent as a project or as a finished understanding. For
example, during the strikes of 2003 I was quite prominently involved in a strike-committee
in the place where I worked. And this gave me the opportunity to see how all
the positions of citezenism and radical democratism were a necessary form
the struggle took, and it is only in understanding this necessity that one can
criticise them, and not simply opposing them as simply false.

To come back to the
previous point: What I mean by the fact that the proletariat is not an immediate
self-consciousness – that it doesn’t know itself simply on its own basis but
only in and through the mediation of capital – we could say the same thing of
the bourgeoisie. The difference is that capital subsumes labour and not the
other way around, which means that in this opposition the self-consciousness
of the bourgeoisie can really become a self-consciousness because it has
integrated the other into its own pole, which could never arrive, which is not
the case with the proletariat.

RR: In the discussions between
Aufheben and TC one can see that your historical periodisation of capitalism, on the
basis of the concepts of formal/real domination of labour by capital –
especially the idea of a second phase of real subsumption – seems to have been
an obstacle. Can you in short explain on what grounds you divide up the
different phases, and also what continuities and differences there are between
yours and Marx’ usage of this terminology?

RS: There are three points in this
question. The first is the question of periodisation. The second is why
this periodisation has become an obstacle in the relation with Aufheben. The
third point is the question of the relation with the canonical texts of Marx
and the definitions of formal and real subsumption.

1. For the question of
periodisation I can point you towards the discussion with Aufheben where the
restructuring, the changes, why they took place is gone into. And equally I can
point back towards my response to the first question where I explained how the
restructuring was first defined and the difficulties we had in defining it.

2. The question of periodisation
was not an obstacle; it was even the central point of the discussion in the
relation with Aufheben. What I think happened with Aufheben was that the
central point of periodisation hid another point and it’s that which became
the obstacle. This hidden point, this other point, was the definition of the
current cycle of struggles, of autonomy, of self-organisation and that was what
really was at stake. Admitting that the periodisation we proposed put into
question these political points, and not simply some theoretical, general and
abstract questions on the periodisation of capital. It equally put into
question a certain conception of the revolution as a subject returning to
itself, a certain humanist conception of the revolution. It became an
obstacle because the question of periodisation, placed on the table all the
questions of autonomy, the subject of returning to itself, self-organisation
and it’s that which finally revealed itself in the last exchanges with
Aufheben and that’s where the discussion actually founded.

3. It seems to me that in the
discussions of real subsumption in Marx there is constantly an ambiguity. Real
subsumption is based on the theory of the relative mode of extraction of
surplus-value. Thus in the development of machinery, in the augmentation of
productivity. At the same time, relative surplus-value can only exist if the
commodities which enter into the reproduction of labour power are themselves
produced in a capitalist manner. So in that sense real subsumption can not be
defined simply on the basis of the transformation of the process of production.
In that sense that the notion of real subsumption implies that which I call
(its not an excellent formulation) a capitalist society; which means the
integration of the reproduction of labour in the cycle of capital itself and
even the transformation of the capital–labour conflict as the dynamic of
capital. And that was not given historically with the appearance of the
machine, and therefore it seems there is a whole ambiguity in the definition of
real subsumption in the texts of Marx. Marx was of his epoch, the fact that he
had already sensed this ambiguity is in itself extraordinary, but we can’t ask
for more. La plus belle fille ne peut donner que ce qu’elle a…2

RR: For this summer camp you have prepared a text for a workshop, ‘Communisation vs. self-organisation’. Can you tell us a little about this text3 and what you hope will come out of the discussions from the workshop?

RS: This text is something a little
new in the problematic of Théorie communiste. In this text, through these
discussions here, Théorie communiste is in the process of becoming a little
optimistic. That is to say, until very recently, we considered that what can
be defined as the dynamic of this cycle of struggles – that the proletariat
places itself into question in its relation to capital – was completely
confounded with the question of acting as a class which is the limit of this
cycle of struggles. So we saw the concept of limit and of dynamic as almost
identical in our vision of struggles until now. In this text there appears a
disjunction between the concept of limit and of dynamic. It is developed in
the several examples under the title of ‘rupture prefigured’:

This rupture announces itself in the multiplication of the disjunction within the class struggle. To act as a class, to struggle as a class is the contemporary limit of class struggle, but this action is, on the one hand, the reproduction of capital and the struggles of the wage within the categories of capital and on the other hand it is the bringing into question by the proletariat of its own existence as a class within its contradiction with capital. This separation between these two sides is the separation between the limit and the dynamic.4

RR: The last question is about the relation between your group and Gilles Dauvé. In 2004 we published a book with Swedish translations of various texts by Dauvé, including ‘Capitalism and Communism’, ‘Leninism and the Ultra-left’ and ‘When Insurrections Die’. Before that we had also translated the text ‘To Work or Not to Work? Is that the Question?’ which is an implied critique of TC. And in the latest issue of our magazine we published a correspondence between members of our editorial board and Dauvé that circulated a lot around TC. Now we think that it is no more than fair to ask what is your view on the disagreements between your group and Dauvé?

RS: Firstly, if we dispute so much
with Dauvé it’s because we have already so much in common, for example the
term communisation, and the desire to arrive at a synthetic understanding of
the period, posing the question of the relation between transformation of
capital and the class struggle, etc. It is because we both have an approach
which I would term theoretical that we can quarrel so much. Having said that,
the principle divergence with Dauvé is his conception of the invariance of
communism as an aspiration to the human community. I think this conception
of Dauvé’s, the invariant aspiration to the human community, is in fact what I
would call the worker’s revolution with a human face of the period from end of
the 60s to the beginning of
the 70s. It’s a vision which
corresponds to a specific historical period which Dauvé takes for an invariant
communism. Linked to this problematic is the question of determinism and the
question of the revolution as a free activity. For example when Dauvé says if
communism is taking our lives into our own hands, what would be the worth of a
revolution to which we are pushed in spite of ourselves? It is this kind of
phrase which for me has no sense, and which is linked to the problematic of
communism as a more or less eternal aspiration to the human community, because
if I am pushed as a proletarian, I am not pushed in spite of myself. It is
from this fundamental point that all the other divergences between TC and Dauvé descend,
because from the moment where we define in this was the aspiration to
communism, the periodisation of the capitalist mode of production has no
meaning. So we can say at the moment capital is the same as it was in 1860, which is what Dauvé
says, which is in my view totally true but totally useless, because from that
point all periodisation of capital becomes a simple affair of conjunctions of
given moments and any attempts to periodise capital are therefore condemned as
determinist.

Another consequence of
this vision of communism, which is in fact that of the end of the 60s to the beginning of
the 70s, is the impossibility
of understanding capital beyond Fordism. Thus, as I said in relation to the Regulation School, the impossibility of
seeing the really existing restructuring as being the restructuring.
There is no model of the restructuring. As TC have abandoned all theories of
communism as the revolutionary nature of the proletariat or as a human
aspiration to community, it’s only to TC that one asks ‘how can it happen?’. It seems that all
the other theoretical productions are excused from responding to this question.
We don’t ask them because whether they believe in a revolutionary nature, or
an aspiration to the human community or a form like self-organisation which
one day or another will prove triumphant, they already have the solution, and
are thus excused from responding to the question ‘how can it happen?’ Because
in their revolutionary nature, or their aspiration to the human community, or
in their grand historical arc of alienation, in their very formulation they
have already given their answer. It is because TC haven’t already placed the
answer within the question that we can actually ask our selves this question,
and that whatever response we give we will always be accused of determinism,
because we take account of history. Thus in suppressing all of those formulations
we have made life difficult for ourselves, because we no longer have anything
but exploittation as the contradiction between the proletariat and capital,
their reciprocal implication, and the history of capital as the history of this
contradiction. And it’s only with that that we can work.

Thus there can be no
more normative attitude in relation to the revolution. Communism and
revolution are historical productions. When you have a normative attitude, you
can say, in relation to the process of class struggle, that something is
lacking here or there – all the ‘they should have done this’ or ‘they didn’t do
that’ that you get in ‘When Insurrections Die’. Which means that you know what
the revolution has to be. And what you know the revolution has to be is
applicable to any epoch. You will say that the insurgents of June 1848 failed to do such and
such, the German workers in 1919/1920 should have done this or that, and if you attempt to
understand what they did in the conditions in which they did it, in itself
and for-itself, you are immediately accused of determinism. At that point the
problem of determinism seems to be resolved, because we have done everything to
prevent the problem of history being posed. Which is to say that becoming, that
history itself, is eliminated. And in my opinion it is at that point that one
arrives at a position that is truly deterministic. Because we wait for
nothing but the arrival of a coincidence. All determinism is placed in the
revolutionary essence of the proletariat, and history is from then on only
there to show from time to time a disjunction between the reality, of a moment
or a movement, and the model. Now of course one can give, as Dauvé and Nesic
do, lots of examples, but what is remarkable when one reads e.g. ‘To Work or
not to Work’, is that those examples are clearly in a chronological order, but
that if they were in any other order it would change absolutely nothing in the
demonstration.

Just to finish on this
question, there is also a big misunderstanding about the way we present the
possibility of communisation: when we say ‘now the revolution presents itself
in this way’ we are certainly not saying ‘finally it presents itself in the
way it always should have’, nor are we saying that capital has resolved the
problems of the proletarians in their place, because in order to imagine that
it would be necessary for those problems to have pre-existed the restructuring
and determined the previous period. But e.g. the problem of the impossibility
of programmatism posed by the last restructuring was not a problem during the
period of programmatism itself, where it was the very course of the revolution,
and if capital has resolved the problem of programmatism it should not be
forgotten that this happened in a restructuring, that is to say in a
counter-revolution, the resolution was produced against the
proletarians, and not as a gift from capital. And today the problematic of
revolution as communisation raises problems just as redoubtable as those of
programmatism, because when it is action as a class which becomes the very
limit of class struggle, and you can only make the revolution in and through
that action, you have some god-awful problems.

Notes

1. ‘social power of labour’ and ‘social labour power’ are terms which occur in the French edition of Capital (chapter 13, just before footnote 13) but are translated in the English as ‘social productive power of labour’ and ‘the productive power of social labour’. I imagine the French is closer to the original German so I have used ‘social labour power’ throughout. Translators note.